Do you have any pointers to how to prepare/select raw meat so that it is safe to eat?

Yes: smell and taste it. If it smells good, eat it. If it doesn't smell good, or if you find yourself wanting to spit it back out (either before or after you swallow), it's bad.

My wife and I have both found that ours bodies are quite sensitive to the scent and taste of raw food; it's easy to tell if something is bad or not. I seem to remember reading somewhere that bacterial counts can be 26 times higher in cooked food than raw, before it's detectable by taste or smell; evidently evolution hasn't had enough time to tune our senses for detecting the quality of cooked proteins!

One other interesting phenomenon I've never seen mentioned anywhere: for lack of anything else to call it, I call it the throat sense. After you swallow something that passes the smell and taste test, but which isn't quite good enough, you'll find an urge to hack it back up from your throat, even though you've already swallowed it.

It's not like throwing up, exactly; it's as if the food just doesn't go all the way down, and you can just spit it right back out again. I think that babies and circus regurgitators make use of the same machinery. But I wasn't aware that I had such a thing, personally, until the first time I swallowed a bad egg that I didn't smell first. (Nowadays, I smell every egg after opening, and I don't refrigerate them. Refrigeration makes them harder to smell, and kept out of the sun, they keep for 2-3 weeks.)

As far as I know, I've never gotten sick from eating a raw protein gone bad, because they don't stay down long enough to reach my stomach. (I did get sick the first time I ate a bad avocado, but I didn't realize yet that it wasn't supposed to taste like that!)

So, as long as you aren't disguising the taste and smell of your food, I wouldn't worry too much about safety. When it comes to raw, if it tastes good, it is good. You can at least trust evolution to get this bit correct. ;-)

I think vat meat would take long enough to catch on that the decline in the meat animal population could be accounted for by slowing the breeding rate.

Why, what happened to the horses? We still have horses.

Well, you're certainly going to get some selective reporting from this poll. Personally, I love eating meat. If it isn't sentient now, isn't going to become sentient in the foreseeable future, and is owned by me, then I have no moral problem with killing it. In fact, I think I could eat venison while watching Disney's film Bambi, without it bothering me.

Avoiding creepy foods like balut or fried locusts counts as "culinary taste".

I'm a lifelong vegetarian, raised by non-vegetarians, but my "rationale" falls squarely into this category, so I guess I can't answer these usefully. I don't see what's so creepy about eating fried locusts compared to eating flesh. Or, for that matter, what's so creepy about eating human flesh compared to the flesh of other mammals.

Inspired by mattnewport's comment, here are additional questions for any vegetarians: if vat-grown meat were developed, would you eat it? Would there be any ethical issues with eating it?

Clever story, dirty tricks. Make them unemotional, neotenous, r-strategy reproducers, bigoted and politically untrustworthy. Imply a short lifespan with no attempt at anti-aging. That variant of humanity is no fun, but what does that tell you about the propaganda topic, the value of long dependent childhood? Almost nothing. Too many confounding factors.

The scenario in which now-like humans, and future humans, find each other's morals mutually repulsive, is interesting. But we have millennia of experience resolving conflicts.

But I think that some attention should also be given to scenarios in which both the now-like humans and the future humans agree that the future humans are morally superior to the old-style humans. That seems more likely, and may be more difficult to resolve, as we have no experience with such problems.

Your perspective might be uncommon, but I share it completely.

• School: sit still and don't speak unless prompted. Wanna go to the toilet, ask for permission. Ten years of this crap. Also, interactions with fellow inmates are fun: "If you leave a bunch of eleven-year-olds to their own devices, what you get is Lord of the Flies" (Paul Graham)

• Home: you're dependent and can't help it. Fights with parents over pocket money and computer time. Go to bed and get up on schedule. No personal space. You can have some jam after you finish your porridge.

• External world: think it's hard to face stereotypes being a woman? Try being a kid.

Isn't a control system using feedback basically analogous to a look-up table?

Only in the sense that, say, the Lotka-Volterra equations are basically analogous to a look-up table. You'd be missing out if you thought that's all it was.